Monkey Grip Read Free

restlessness, his idleness, his violent changes of mood, his inability to sustain himself. Being with him was sometimes like being with a child: not that he asked me, as Grace and the Roaster asked me, to kick things along, to keep it all running; but if I hadn’t done it, I would have been at the mercy of his erratic nature – unbalanced, vague, out of sync.
    â€˜What about this way I’ve got of falling in love with people and just as quickly out again?’ I asked the I Ching.
    â€˜It is not immutable fate . . . that caused the state of corruption,’ it replied, ‘but rather the abuse of human freedom.’
    He sat at my table just out of the shower, wet hair and his blue eyes burning.
    â€˜Geez, you’re goodlooking,’ I remarked over my shoulder as I stood at the sink. His face closed up. His eyes dropped to his bitten hands and cigarette.
    â€˜You get excruciated when I say things like that, don’t you.’ He nodded.
    The bead fly curtain rattled and Clive stepped in from tending his pigeons. He stopped inside the door, grinning at us from under his absurd cloud of henna’d hair.
    â€˜Wanna take the kids to the baths?’ he said, inadvertently puncturing the small balloon of awkwardness. Javo sat there smoking while we rounded up Gracie and the Roaster, took their bathers (smelling, like the children themselves, strongly of chlorine) off the line, and disentangled our bikes from the heap outside the kitchen door: my thirty dollar grid, and Clive’s blue and silver Coppi racer, which he called his filly. The Roaster rode on Clive’s bar, Gracie on my carrier. We bumped over the gutter and on to the softening bitumen.
    The kids begin to sing. We roll in unison (me upright and straight-backed with outstretched arms, Clive bent low over his handlebars with the Roaster crouching inside the curve of his body) down the wide road and into the green tunnel, the cave of the Edinburgh Gardens. No-one around, though it is ten o’clock in the morning. The hoses flick silver strings on to the drying grass. The cicadas beat a rhythm that comes in waves, like fainting or your own heartbeat. We sweep round the corner into the Belgium Lane, where the air is peppery with the scent of cut timber and even on this still day the poplars flutter over the ancient grey picket fence; they thrust up their sprouts through the cracking asphalt under our wheels. Between the posts we flash without hesitation and out of the cool we hit the road again and get down to the work of it, pedalling along Napier Street: our speed makes Gracie’s legs flail behind me like oars.
    â€˜Hang on, hang on!’ I shout to Grace, and feel her fingers obediently tighten on my pants as we forge across a gap in the heedless double stream of traffic in Queen’s Parade, and coast again (the Coppi ticking soothingly) the last few yards to the racks outside the Fitzroy baths.
    Broken glass glitters nastily all along the top of the cream brick walls. We chain our bikes to the rack. The Roaster grabs his towel and springs over the hot concrete to the turnstile. Gracie holds my hand with her hard brown one and we pick our way between the baking bodies to the shallow pool.
    The brightness of that expanse of concrete is atomic: eyes close up involuntarily, skin flinches. I lower myself gingerly on to the blazing ground and watch the kids approach the pool. The Roaster slips over the side and wades inexorably deeper; Gracie waves to me and squints, wraps her wiry arms around her belly, and sinks like a rich American lady beneath the chemicals.
    â€˜No-one will ever understand,’ I say to Clive, ‘but this is paradise.’
    â€˜Paradise enow,’ he answers, neatly laying out a towel and applying his skin to its knobbly surface. No further need to speak. The sun batters us into a coma. I pull my hat over my eyes and settle down on my elbows to the day’s vigilance.

MORE POLITELY